IGMS Issue 27

by IGMS

  The ocean wind makes the colossus rotate laterally, and only then I discover the cause of the phenomenon: the entire back end of the elongated cabin, which should house the machines, finds itself blackened and partially destroyed. A thin, dark smoke bears forth from the deep cuts in the metal in its flank and bottom. Le Beau pronounces out loud the diagnosis that I have also deduced; his voice comes out loaded with excitement:

  "Sacre Bleu! It was one of our missiles, Admiral! Those four we shot blind, before we submerged, one of them hit the target full on!"

  Indeed, to our surprise, the enemy finds himself in a situation very similar to ours. Even though the damage suffered justified giving up the fight, they had remained there the entire night, waiting, putting out their fires and trying to recover their navigability as we did below the waters. Now, much as ourselves, they find themselves ready for combat.

  The dirigible turns its prow in our direction, and the innumerable metal plates which cover its slightly deflated balloon sparkle in the sun like scales. The hum of the motors, at least those which remain, grow in intensity. It approaches slowly, but decidedly.

  I hear when Le Beau disarms the safety on his machinegun. The metal clack coincides with my hurried hand gesture, indicating for him to wait. I raise the scope of my gun and order the lieutenant that, at whatever cost, he await my first shot.

  Now the adversary is so close that I can see the crew's silhouettes through the cabin's ample and rectangular front hatch. The bombardment cannons find themselves, thanks to the cabin's abnormal position, facing upwards. They certainly won't be able to aim at a target on the ocean surface. The starboard cannons are inclined excessively downwards, and the dirigible would have to come very close to us to have a sure shot, just like the lower cannons, or what is left of them, would have to be almost directly above the submersible to be effective, considering the balloon's low altitude. At the front of the prow, however, two machinegun barrels similar to those of the Nautilus point at us in threatening fashion. It is when the dirigible comes a little closer that the rays of the rising sun fill the lower window, and then I spot him clearly. Right at the center, supported by an uncomfortably inclined gunwhale, a man wears a command kepi and a sailor-style blue-and-white striped shirt, covered by a blue jacket and raised collar. For the first time in the history of this war, the two so-called "living legends" Admiral Nemo and Commander Robur find themselves eye-to-eye.

  Le Beau wipes the sweat from his forehead on the sleeve of his jacket. He rocks from side to side with uncontrolled excitement. To my mind comes the image of a ferocious mastiff waiting for its owner to release its leash so it can shred an aggressor, and a nibble of fear runs through me that, despite his habitual respect and obedience, this time I won't be capable of holding him back for very long.

  "Sir, they're already closer than we could ever have hoped! We should fire, before they . . ."

  "Control yourself, Le Beau," I interrupt, mixing serenity with firmness. "Don't shoot until I give the command."

  During several seconds, it is as if the very sea interrupts its tireless rolling, and the very wind becomes silent. From high on his reluctant floating castle, Robur faces me unmoving, from behind the deadly barrels of his weapons. For a single moment, that feels like an eternity, my mind feels a sting of fear of being wrong; that I am a foolish romantic, fully believing in human dignity; that a fatal piece of incandescent metal will explode in my skull at any moment, scattering pieces of my ingenuity-soaked brain to the seven seas.

  But, like I said, it is only for an instant. I erect my spinal column, without removing my fingers from the trigger of my own gun, and reciprocate his look. The silence is almost unbearable, broken only by Le Beau's astonished gasp.

  Commander Robur raises an arm in a respectful salute, and the gigantic Albatross turns on its axis, slowly setting off along the Irish coast and leaving us behind. Obviously, I return the salute in the same fashion, and hold position until the leviathan's shadow no longer forebodes any threat.

  An inevitable sigh of relief caresses my nostrils, weather-beaten by the ocean wind. By my side, an open-mouthed second-in-command stares at me with fish eyes.

  "Admiral Nemo . . ."

  Why didn't they shoot? is the question stuck like a fishhook in his throat.

  "They could have . . ." he says, "and we could have as well . . ."

  "And where is the honor in that? 'Code of ethics', Le Beau. Do you remember that night in the bar in Le Havre?"

  "But, Admiral, we were visibly incapacitated for combat!"

  "And they were also, isn't that right? There is no sense in attacking a defenseless enemy. Despite what they may say of Robur, I have nothing personal against the man. Quite the contrary, I admire his valor and respect him enough to not want to be responsible for his death in such a degrading manner, coldly executed like an animal in a slaughterhouse. The Albatross won't be a threat again too soon. Much less the Nautilus. The best thing to do, and it appears he and I agree on this, is to return to our dens and lick our wounds, until such time as we're capable of once again realizing proper combat.

  "You couldn't be sure, sir," retorts Le Beau, mocking. "If he had decided to fire those machineguns . . ."

  "In one thing the tabloids are correct, Lieutenant: Nemo and Robur are twins born on different sides of the same war. We just proved that, I suppose."

  "Right. But suppose for a moment, Sir, that you were wrong about the man . . ."

  I walk over the prow's wet metal and place my hand gently on the still tense shoulder of that impetuous youth."

  "This is a long and arduous war. Thanks to it, this world has seen much pain and unhappiness. After all this time, my friend, that which still makes us human dangles by a thread, hanging over the abysm of savagery. Men of honor need to live under a code of ethics that makes us remember that, despite it all, we're still human. I bet that Robur was one of those men of honor, who, if God allowed, could use the time which is left him to set a good example for an entire generation of soldiers."

  At that moment, one of the officials emerges from the hatch, and announces:

  "Admiral, we've renewed the oxygen reserves. I believe this will allow us to pass several miles submerged, in case the English navy decides to give pursuit. We can finally head home and realize definitive repairs with tranquility."

  "Then let us welcome the ocean's embrace and set course. There don't appear to be any more thrills worth staying out here for."

  My second-in-command is a stubborn young man. On the way to the bridge, he insists:

  "Sir, I still assert that you could have been mistaken about Robur. In that case, I'm afraid we would be irrevocably dead."

  "If I had been mistaken about my 'twin brother' . . . Well, Le Beau, what would be the fun of living in a world like that?"

  The Nautilus dives into the calm waters, slowly moving away from the conflict zone. The sun and clear sky forecast a serene, pleasant day.

  Translated by Christopher Kastensmidt

  InterGalactic Interview With Theodora Goss

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  (Recorded at the World Fantasy Convention, San Diego, CA, Oct 30, 2011)

  Theodora Goss is the author of The Thorn and the Blossom, which has just appeared from Quirk Books. Her first short story collection is The Forest of Forgetting (Prime, 2006). She has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award, and she has won the World Fantasy Award for "The Singing of Mount Abora" (best short story, 2008). She has also won the Rhysling Award for her poem "Octavia Lost in the Hall of Masks" in 2004. She lives in Boston.

  SCHWEITZER: Let's just start out with your background, who you are, and how you came to writing.

  GOSS: Do you want me to go through my life story a little bit? Okay.

  SCHWEITZER: Well it is somewhat exotic. More than mine. I was born in New Jersey.

  GOSS: It is somewhat exotic. I was definitely not born in New Jersey. This does actually have
quite a lot to do with my writing. I was born in Hungary, back in the Communist era. I left the country when I was, I think, about five years old. There was really no legal way to leave the country back then. So we officially escaped from a Communist country. That was one of the first things that happened in my life. So it's an exciting background to have. But I moved around a lot. We lived in Italy for a while after that and then we lived in Brussels, and then we came to the United States. Even when we were in the United States, we ended up moving a lot. I think because we were moving so much, because I always had to make new friends and get used to new places, one of the things I held onto during my childhood was books. I would read books and I would find a home in places like Narnia or Middle Earth, and they were always there for me in a way that geographical locations were not always there for me. I think that's why I started reading fantasy, or at least partly the reason that I started reading fantasy, that they gave me this sense of home, and they didn't seem strange to me. They didn't seem particularly unusual. I could understand that people were talking to dragons and things like that, because to me the real world seemed fantastical anyway, partly because I'd had such a sense of dislocation in childhood.

  SCHWEITZER: Was English your first reading language?

  GOSS: No, actually my first reading language was French. So I started reading children's books in French, and it wasn't until I was about seven years old that I started learning English.

  SCHWEITZER: So you must have grown up with French fairy tales. This might have been an improvement, because you didn't get the Disney versions.

  GOSS: I definitely didn't get the Disney versions. I grew up with not just French fairy tales; I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. What I got when I was a child were European books. We had European books in my house, books of European fairy tales, things that my mother had grown up on. We had an entire book of fairy tales from the Baltic area, I remember. We had them in English and in the original Hungarian. I guess they were originally in Hungarian. So we had these stories from Eastern Europe, and they are much, much darker than the versions of fairy tales that are told to American children. I hadn't really thought about this before, but that must have influenced me deeply, because when I tell fairy tales - and my fairy tales are for adults - they are much more dark. When you marry a bear, for example, that has consequences of various sorts. It's a strange, very real thing and not at all a kind of Disney thing.

  SCHWEITZER: When I was growing up in the U.S., they very much had the attitude that fantasy of any sort is only for small children and it is something they are to be encouraged to outgrow, which would explain the trivialized versions. Isn't it true that in Europe they treat the fantastic with a little more respect?

  GOSS: I think that's true in a certain sense, though in an odd way, because my mother had grown up under the Communist system, the old folktales were given respect; but on the other hand there was this notion that literature for adults was supposed to be realistic. So I think that she always looked at my writing fantasy as a very odd thing. The kind of literature that she had grown up with was about workers and when you had American books that were coming to Hungary, they were John Steinbeck, about the plight of the American worker. There really was censorship of literature back in those days. There were books you could read and books you couldn't read, that were expurgated. But I think she had, without really thinking about it, grown up with the idea that literature was supposed to reflect real life. So she always looked at my writing fantasy and reading fantasy as a very American sort of thing. So it's interesting, the way that Communism had this impact on genre.

  SCHWEITZER: Did they have any samizdat tradition? The Russians certainly did, which is where we get the word. I wonder if this didn't become a kind of forbidden fruit.

  GOSS: I think it did, actually. What you find in Eastern Europe now is that since the fall of the Berlin Wall there are a lot more people who are interested in fantasy and science fiction. I think that part of it is that it is associated with American culture for them, and it is associated with liberation, the permission to write what you want. They're very small movements, still, but it's interesting that most of the stories of mine that have been translated have been translated into Russian or Rumanian or Hungarian or Polish. They have been translated into Eastern European languages. Maybe it is because I have a connection with the area, but also there has been an upsurge of interest in science fiction and fantasy in those areas.

  SCHWEITZER: Isn't it also interesting that most American fantasy is not about America? Some of it does, but most of it is not about Native Americans and magic buffaloes or whatever. It has castles and elves in it. It looks back to Europe.

  GOSS: I think that's partly because so many Americans came from Europe originally. Their ancestry comes from Europe. There is a way in which they brought their literature with them, brought their folktales with them, and their magical figures, and you haven't really had an incorporation of a Native American tradition into an American literary fantasy tradition. This is in some sense unfortunate, I guess. We had a panel on this at Wiscon. The more problematic aspect is that when you do have an incorporation of that tradition it is not necessarily by people who are brought up in that tradition. So they don't necessarily have the feel for it, and they can write it in ways that aren't very true to the original. At least these were some of the problems that we were discussing.

  In some sense it is easier to write about Irish fairies, because they are more removed from us. But I think that we have a kind of immigrant fantasy tradition. We take liberally from the fantasy traditions of all different countries, and we mix stuff up. I heard complaints about how we mess up Irish fairies and do things to Irish fairies that people are looking at dubiously. But I think we have a very eclectic fantasy tradition.

  SCHWEITZER: Maybe we even take fairies a little more seriously. I heard a great story from Michael Swanwick once. He and his wife were in Ireland, and they were looking at this stone circle that was in someone's back yard, and as they were doing so a ten-year-old boy came out and said, "What are you doing?" and he said, "We're looking at the fairy ring." With a look of absolute disgust the boy said, "Don't tell me you believe in fairies!" Is it possible that precisely because they don't have this sort of tradition in America, Americans look back to it more.

  GOSS: I think that's part of it. There is also a sense in which our lives are so urban now and so focused on the technological that we are nostalgic for a fantasy tradition that seems to link us to something authentic and something of the land. There are certain countries that stand in for that kind of authenticity, and Ireland is one of them. We have these beautiful images in our minds of Ireland as green and somehow enchanted and magical. It's a way for us to mentally connect back to something that feels real and natural in the middle of our lives, which are lived online and in urban centers for the most part.

  SCHWEITZER: There is an American tradition, but maybe for most writers it's as much of a stretch as writing about ancient Greece or something. In any case, it's only got a couple hundred years of depth. I am thinking of Stephen Vincent Benet or Manly Wade Wellman, or Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series. These are fantasies about white people in America. But you and I have never lived in a log cabin in the woods, now have we? So we are just as removed from that as we are from living in a castle.

  GOSS: What about Lovecraft? I mean, Lovecraft was not looking back to Europe in the same way that Poe was. Poe really was looking back to Europe for his fantasy tradition, but Lovecraft seems to have created something that was, for me, deeply influenced by what was going on in Europe intellectually in the last part of the 19th century, but on the other hand it seems very different from what anyone else has done.

  SCHWEITZER: I think Lovecraft was looking back to his New England roots, back to the 17th or 18th century, often very overtly; but he was also looking forward and outward. He wasn't looking at the past at all. He was looking at the Einsteinian universe. Remember that he came at precise
ly the time when they discovered that those swirly things you see in telescopes are actually other galaxies. There was a time when astronomers thought that the universe was shaped like a mill-wheel, and those pinwheel things were just swirling clouds of gas, and not very far away. Suddenly, in Lovecraft's time, the universe got vastly bigger and much more chaotic. So the answer is that Lovecraft is looking forward through the perspective of the cutting-edge science of his day.

  GOSS: I think there is something very American about that. We're the ones who put men on the Moon, right? There's something that feels very American about the sense of uncertainty about the future, a kind of fear linked to the exploration of space. There is something to me that feels very much of this country. I say that because I grew up in Europe and there is a different feeling there. There is a different relationship to time, in a sense. You are so living in traces of the past. I remember going down in the metro in Budapest when I went to visit there, and parts of the metro are Roman ruins. There is such a tendency in Europe to look back at the past more than there is to look forward to the future. In a sense, the fact that we have such a short past as Europeans in this country - or as immigrants in this country, I should say, because obviously not all of us are European immigrants - we don't have that deep sense of the past; although Lovecraft also had a deep sense of a very weird past. I mean, he was looking back at an incredibly distant past which was a very non-human past.